Found this on Imgur -
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how about “choke the police?”
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Sorry, the marketing department says that’s too wordy. They suggest “Everything is Fine!”
/s
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I’m Australian and that’s definitely not the world I grew up in - but I just did a bit of googling and some states here now have “school based policing” programs, though it’s not immediately clear what that involves - I’ll have to read a bit more…
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Folks, given my track record, I am really worried to even post this: I have to admit that when I first heard the “defund the police” slogan I also thought it was incredibly stupid, and that of course Biden could not agree. Which of course he did not. Now, in @Wanderfound’s link, he is expanding under the sub-heading “Don’t defund police, support reforms”.
That’s why I’m proposing an additional $300 million to reinvigorate community policing in our country. Every single police department should have the money they need to institute real reforms like adopting a national use of force standard, buying body cameras, and recruiting more diverse police officers.
As far as I see it, that’s a result of the problem the posters like @QuickBrownFox and @Dioptase1 above were worried about.
However, they are wrong in their main point. At the core: as many of you explained, rephrasing didn’t help in the past, it won’t now.
I think these three sum it up nicely:
(Editorial note: rather “since” than "if.)
From the outside, on the other side of the pond, I have really no idea how you will keep the momentum in this push for change in the US. But I very much hope it will work.
Bottom line for me, personally:
You might feel irate, on both sides of the argument. But I, once again, learned stuff from your posts and replies, so I am grateful for all your energy and effort you put in this. I don’t see it as wasted, therefore. Thank you, all.
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Isn’t it funny how the Republican party will argue that the way to institute reform is to DEFUND federal programs, but somehow that won’t work at the municipal level.
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Community policing, or more generally official civilian oversight of police, was the kind of reform instituted after the police riots 50 years ago. We were very optimistic then it would fix the problem, but it didn’t, hence the justified skepticism from several in this thread and others.
However, before offering alternatives it makes sense to understand why it didn’t work, to make sure new proposals don’t suffer the same fate. From what I’ve seen in places I’ve lived, I don’t think it is wholly dissimilar with other forms of regulation, where the initial gung-ho regulators eventually give way to political appointments who cozy up to the industry. Whatever else it has, any new structure, or revitalization of the old structure, is going to need some way to make sure the leadership continues to be drawn from people deeply committed to reform even after this round of protests fades into memory.
ETA: more specifically relevant to this thread, there is another problem in the US, namely that many local authorities are based in governmental structures which exist almost entirely for the sake of operating a police department. Anoka County is one such, though their sheriff’s office says that the directive to slash tires came from a thing called the Multi-Agency Command Center. Even though I lived in Minnesota for a few years, I don’t know what that is or where its authority originates.
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I will accept police reform along the lines of welfare reform, that is to say they get far less money to their budget and anything that they want to do with it is scrutinized by ten people offended by their very existence.
“You want new firearms and tanks? Sorry, you can only use the expenditure card to buy cheap ballpoint pens and uniforms from company Z who gave us the best deal (because he uses recycled livestock truck covers as his fabric). Wait… this smells like good coffee. And this milk is fresh. Sorry, but if you can afford that in your lunchroom, we need to review your entire salary structure.”
That’s why in my example above I said you only needed half the budget, split among multiple programs to achieve what seem to be unimaginable results.
Think of all the nice things your municipality has said “we can’t afford”. And yet somehow, they always manage to find more money for cops. 
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My concern wasn’t so much that rephrasing is necessary to package reform so that it would be implemented. Protests change minds, but it takes people in office to implement change. My concern was that politicians necessary to enact reform are being put in lose-lose situation. Embrace the name and lose votes from people who misunderstand it and very well might vote for an opponent. Or distance themselves and lose votes from people deciding it’s not worth voting at all if nothing will change.
As you pointed out, Biden has already depressingly made a stance. And Biden will lose votes. He will be the template for a lot of local politicians. They have to decide which will lose them an unacceptable number of votes. It might have been nice if he was able to support defunding, but not at the expense of Trump being re-elected (especially since you can’t enact if you don’t win). Defunding the police is being effectively killed.
6 or 7 months from now, the political landscape could be radically different. Justice delayed is justice denied, but very little serious reform is going to take place at state or federal level until this election cycle is over. Who is in charge when the dust settles is important.
FYI: Believe it or not, I ran for city council 2 years ago. Part of my platform was to reduce the police force and get rid of the armored personnel carrier. That did not go over well!
Never count on a single registered Republican to not vote Republican. The key as always for Dems is to increase voter turnout. Like clockwork, when there’s more voter turnout, Dems win. If you think being inoffensive accomplishes that, please do some more research. Inspiration is what gets people to get out and vote, despite GOP voter suppression techniques. Being mild and non threatening is never the path to victory for Dems. And that’s glaringly obvious to anyone who who simply looks at which Dems have won in the past 70 years and which lost. The inspirational candidates, even the ones who were controversial, won; the safe and boring candidates all lost.
“Defunding the police” is already the watered-down version of “abolish the police.” Abolition, as @wanderfound already mentioned, is a powerful word and was chosen intentionally. Because, again, it’s not about finding the least offensive or controversial name. You’ll notice you don’t see signs that say, “FLUFFY KITTEN POLICING!” The movement isn’t trying to convince people who are “concerned” or “disappointed” about violent policing and police brutality against African Americans. It’s recruiting people who are pissed off about those things. It’s about choosing a name that inspires those people to do something about it.
If you’re on board with the policy, but don’t like the name, get over it. It’s not for you. Otherwise, you’re just another centrist trying to dilute and co-opt a movement that you’re late to join. If you haven’t been calling for structural change in policing for decades, you’re welcome to help the movement; but you can go to the back of the bus; you don’t just show up and get to drive.
And I say that as someone who wasn’t nearly involved enough over that time. I wasn’t nearly pissed off enough. So I’m also in the back of the bus. I’m saying all this because I’ve saved you a seat.
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It’s more like it has been the tactic for the last 50+ years.
I feel like I am getting a good understanding of how Malcolm X felt about white liberals, and I’m white too.
Everytime I hear incrementalist reform offered as a solution to today’s problems (which are actually yesterdays problems that weren’t sorted out) I think “We’re all going to die”, not in a panicked way but as part of a sense of resignation that I cannot give in to.
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Dude, as I mention in another post, I actually ran for office a couple years back with a platform of reducing the police and getting rid of their armored personnel carrier (due to an incumbent Democrat mayor, BTW). I lost, but I spent time and money walking the walk, literally from door to door. Don’t give me crap about saving a seat on the bus that is going to haul your ass around for you.
Inspiring slogans are fine. But slogans don’t pass laws or budgets. I ran in an area that is 60% registered Democrat, but met a lot of resistance from them about just getting rid of the personnel carrier. The mayor was their dude. But the main predictor was over/under 50.
Ironically, it was Republicans that were most interested in saving money by reducing the police force and not paying for maintenance on the carrier. Go figure!
(The other two parts of my platform were not bringing in chain restaurants and adding walking/biking trails. Those were less controversial since all the other candidates started saying the same thing. So even though I lost, I can claim a small victory.)
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Yes. We need clarity on these issues, not more corporate branding.
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These two sentences contradict every single post you’ve made in this thread.
Michael Brown was killed by police in 2014.
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That what I meant. (And, in a way, that still means rephrasing.)
By Biden. And the so-called Democrats. (The other pundits are effectively going full neo-fascist.)
What many others argue here is that continue to pushing hard, with a hard slogan, is what brings change.
Pressure from the street, however, can make a budget. Pressure from the street can even topple whole governments.
If you will bear with me for one tiny moment: I generally agree with you that the term is shit because the (somehow ‘centrist’, I gather) candidate of that other party cannot embrace the term. He is bound to fail.
But since everything else has been tried over and over again, and also failed, as your fellow citizens in this topic keep telling you (forcefully, to an extent that I had the feeling I should probably not get involved…) and people are still dying because of this, the pressure must mount. And semantics and wording are the least of the problems in regard to that.
Either Biden will move at some point, and embrace the points (not the term ‘defund’, but the policy), or he will fail his fellow citizens.
All of them.
You can dig in your heels, and argue with people here. Things get more heated. There’s no winning in that, for noone.
I certainly did more than once, and maintain my position on some points which I cannot and will not share their particular perspective. (Even on terms and semantics. I give you one example: Konzentrationslager.)
But you can also maintain your point while still supporting defunding the police, and accepting that everyone else here has also good points, and not argue too much about it since that train (or bus) has already left the station.
We don’t know what shit is going to hit the fan in the next couple of months. But when pressure stays high, and people are supporting the cause whatever the slogan is, there can be change.
To paraphrase: the branding isn’t important. The product counts.
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Not at all. If all you want to do is inspire with slogans, so be it. That’s fine.
But I’m not aware of any slogan that has held an elected seat. They can’t pass laws. That requires a person to be elected or appointed by those elected. Getting elected takes more than good ideas and and inspiring slogans. And slogans can backfire.
Inspiring your base is fine. You don’t gain much, since they are in agreement already. And the opposition is going to oppose no matter what. But there’s a big group of people in the middle that are could go either way. Slogans that draw them in, instead of repel them, would seem wise if you want to actually elect people to pass laws that align with the slogan.
You can keep the cookie. I assume it’s some sort of insult.
You entered this thread with the (arrogant as all get out) premise of tone-policing the slogan “defund the police.” You jumped in to defend someone who was suggesting a term that included “reform,” a term guaranteed to lose everyone most passionate and vocal about the movement; people who are the ones most affected by the structural racism of policing. At some point, that tone policing becomes a destructive force to co-opt the movement, and dissolve it from within.
That’s why saying a dozen posts later that “the name doesn’t matter” contradicts the point that you started with.
If you don’t want the cookie, don’t ask for one.
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Right? I do want to piggyback off what you said here, because it needs to be amplified…
That’s a big part of the problem, though, thinking that how we spin things is going to change the minds of those who have no interest in equality. This is part of how we got here, by focusing endlessly on messaging and spinning instead of doing the hard work of adresssing problems people face. So much wasted resources on marketing and messaging to middle class white people who don’t give a shit about their working class brothers and sisters that could have been spent on focusing on real issues faced by real people, starting with the shit show of voting that happened in my city yesterday. It’s not a marketing problem with the “centrist” voters, it’s that they have no sense of solidarity with people who are poor and of a different race. We need to stop pretending that the middle class voter in American is going to magically wake up if we say just the right words. It’s literally magical thinking. We need people to do what they are actually doing right now, which is to cut through the bullshit and get out on the street. They are saying exactly what needs to be said, in a million different ways. The democratic party could lean into that, embrace it, and work for real change, and stop doing dumb shit like trying to get just the right message out. If you stand for actual, real policies that will have a positive impact on the lives of actual human beings, then that can make a difference.
Pandering to the middle is how we got here, because the democrats keep chasing the hard right and the “independents”. they need to address the problems and concerns of their actual constituents for once. The truth is that the “centrists” are prone to embracing the right wing if it keeps up the status quo. The centrists are not our friends, and they will not help us. We can only do this ourselves and playing their games only helps them to once again shove these issues back down again. If we do that again, the “fire next time” will not be as peaceful as what we are seeing now.
Tone policing is a “nice” way to shut down some voices. It’s never intended to engage thoughtfully on a topic, it’s a means of trying to gain the moral high ground in order to shut up the voices (most often) of marginalized people. Always.
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